This is not an isolated incident. These schools operated all across Canada, were created specifically to "de-savage the indians", had zero accountability, and almost destroyed an entire people. These kids were taken from their parents, imprisoned in these places, and endured endless abuse for their formative years. And this went on until 1994 in some places!
This is Canada's great shame, and we've barely scratched the surface.
Arte made a very good documentary about it, but I can't remember the name atm.
I watch ARTE often and I wonder why this specific video is blocked here (Canada). Do they fear that they may face repercussion from the government or some other entities?
There is also this excellent and difficult-to-watch movie about a Canadian First Nations boy who is forcibly separated from his family and raised in one of the Catholic orphanages. He has an extraordinary talent for playing hockey--this is a Canadian film after all--but that talent is squandered from all the abuse he is subjected to.
There’s also a great comic book by Joe Sacco called “Paying the Land”. It’s an illustrated reportage where he travels to indigenous communities in Canada and recounts their stories. Resident schools and their destructive effects on individuals and communities are a recurring theme. I love the book, but it’s a hard read.
almost, but not completely. there are still First Nations tribes, they still practice their cultures, the languages are critically endangered but many still have a few (usually elder) speakers.
I volunteer working to revitalize a Pacific Northwestern Indian language. there's still hope, and still ways to help.
USSR had and Russia still has boarding schools for the children of the indigenous people of the North https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JVWOd-DsAw. I wonder if there any reckoning is to come here.
This is one incident among many, but it has less to do with indigenous children as it does with any system wherein the accounting of "disconnected" children is left to that system. Tuam, County Galway ... eight hundred infants with missing graves. St Mary's Cemetery in Lanark, four hundred left in a single mass grave. In Germany, nuns pimping out orphans. The Sisters of Mercy scandal. I could go on.
Bluntly put, when an institution is given power over children, more than that of a family, and the auditing is lax, you're gonna get maltreatment, and from there unmarked graves. Indigenous, orphans, those "born out of wedlock" in the old days, any child prised loose from the family is at tremendous risk of physical abuse, sexual molestation, death, and discarding.
I'm not sure what it says about the human race in general but it isn't very cheery.
These children weren’t abandoned, they were forcefully taken from their families by the government. They were sent vast distances to these boarding schools to “kill the Indian in the child”, where they were often mistreated, sexually abused, and went missing ( murder/neglect/ abuse). So it is all the more egregious in this case. The government turned a blind eye to the Churches, and the Churches were doing God’s work. These stories are uncovering the horrors described by the survivors that were generally ignored until recently.
We will never be perfect, but we can keep trying to be better.
The whole system makes a lot more sense if you imagine it through the belief in the “white man’s burden” at the time - it was the white man’s responsibility to educate and assimilate “inferior” cultures into the “superior” Western system. Not to excuse the damage done, but the people doing these things felt like it was their moral responsibility - if they didn’t do it, these cultures would forever be stuck in their inferior ways.
Yes, and this is the most difficult form of racism to recognize and avoid. Hatred is easy to recognize. Racism without hatred is often discounted.
It’s the people with good intentions who are acting with inherent biases and preconceived world-views who often commit acts of blatant racism without anyone realizing until it’s too late.
I find it odd that some Christian conservatives in the US support policies which are essentially racist. I had a talk with my girlfriend about it and she mentioned one reason could be that they actually think they're doing the right thing according to the Bible. It's true that religion/belief-system "partitions" people -- you're either one of us or we must be against you. Not saying that some (supposedly) Christians aren't taking advantage of religion to justify their agenda, but many actually believe what they're doing is right.
It's also difficult to change this situation because for many people maintaining homeostasis is much easier and more favorable than opening up their minds to other opinions. Many religious people (not just Christians) I've known just want to follow a set of "rules" and have a simple standard life.
For example, travel ban for certain countries based on their religion, the wall between the US and Mexico (which I know has its own advantages, but the whole concept is kinda humiliating if you think about it from the Mexicans' perspective), no H1B visa for international students after graduation, etc.
The government would have never let the Church (run schools) take responsibility for the kids if the Church wasn't mistreating them like this. They would have just run their own abusive boarding schools.
Slow moving genocide and generally treating these populations like crap to the point where they chose to forgo their culture was the whole point.
I was about to disagree with you, when my brain finally made sense of the double negative in that first paragraph. So I figured I'd just leave a comment to that effect to save anyone else the same potential mistake.
In short, above is saying that the abuse and neglect was a feature, not a bug, as far as the government was concerned, and is absolutely correct.
Hunter-gatherer societies across the world have, historically, fared poorly when agricultural or pastoral societies have moved into their territory. Complete extermination (i.e. genocide) or complete assimilation is the rule, not the exception. Such genocides happened all over the world but have mostly passed out of living memory with the winners preferring not to be reminded of them. This didn't happen in Canada for several reasons.
Most native tribes, especially in the West, were not crushed militarily, as they were in the U.S.. The crown and most tribes signed treaties. While what was going on South of the border was, no doubt, instructive, it's to both sides' credit that they looked for a peaceful way to coexist. The terms of those treaties remain controversial today but, nonetheless, they put Canada's natives on fundamentally different footing than almost any other overrun hunter-gatherer societies in human history. They had an established, legal right to continue existing.
It's incredibly difficult for us, today, to understand the state of affairs that existed just after these treaties were signed. Native tribes were not peacefully co-existing, stagnant populations that had existed in the same spot for thousands of years. They moved around, bumped into each other, struggled to defend territories, had wars, raided each other. Raiding was so honoured and economically important in some tribe's cultures that even other native tribes did not want to be their neighbours. A big part of why so many tribes were eager to sign treaties with the Crown was that the Crown was promising security. They wouldn't have to continually fight other tribes to keep their sources of food secure. The Crown proved to be a less than completely secure food source themselves at first, but that's another discussion.
When we, today, talk about the desire of leaders such as John A Macdonald to "kill the Indian in the child", we find this atrocious. We respect diversity of religion and culture. However, at the time of John A Macdonald, native culture presented real problems. It was actually progressive for the time to think that natives could be as productive as any other Canadian citizens if they could be educated to adopt European economic pursuits and abandon cultural practices, such as raiding, that were wholly incompatible with the peace and order the Crown promised its citizens, native and European alike. There were those, at the time, who still espoused outright genocide. There remain, even today, places in the world where outright genocide is pursued actively.
The residential schools are a painful part of history that is still, very much, in raw living memory. However, we must look at the big picture too. In almost any other place and time in history, native cultures would already be utterly extirpated. They still exist and thrive in Canada and there is every reason to hope that they will continue to do so. How many other times in history have cultures so alien to each other managed to coexist? There remain many problems to tackle, but hope for the future is well justified based on Canada's past.
Sometimes the genocide runs in the opposite direction, e.g. the Janjaweed (pastoralists) militia in Darfur, Sudan. Global warming led to a drought, the farmers enclosed their lands to prevent grazing, and the Sudanese government used the ensuing tensions to enroll the Janjaweed in their militia. Whether pastoralists qualify as hunter-gatherers depends on your definition, of course, but they are certainly mobile.
And of course, on a much grander scale you have Temujin (Genghis Khan) and the Mongols.
I think OP agrees with you and is trying to say that the tendency of us to prefer institutions over families can lead to this.
For example, I know when I was a kid the school teachers and people were constantly worried about me and my family since we're immigrants from a part of the world they thought of as "backwards". We did not have liberal social views, and my parents opted me out of sex ed, LGBT events, etc. One time I mentioned a comic strip (Calvin & Hobbes) in which the kid dreamed of flying an F-14 with a team of T-Rex pilots to blow up his school because he really didn't want to attend and I was called in for some government program to prevent terrorism and they asked me all sorts of questions about how violent my parents are and did I believe in violence as a tool to solve problems, etc.
Sometimes our tendency is to "civilize" children when we think parents aren't doing that. What OP and you are trying to say is that what parents and family offer (accountability, care for the child, etc.) is usually better than any "values" an institution can impart onto a child. Institutions can often be cold and cruel in a way few parents ever are, and so the tendency to lean on institutions with regards to molding children is one we should avoid unless absolutely necessary.
It’s dangerous to comment on this article without knowing what residential schools were.
Children were forcibly taken from their families by the Canadian government for no other reason than the families they were born into.. to be converted to a different culture and faith and endured horrific abuses across the board in every residential school.
A good place to learn why these children specifically suffered, and how monstrously wrong it was (some schools operated into the 1980s and 1990s) is the Truth and reconciliation commission that took place in Canada.
It seems like the Catholic Church is often (always?) somehow involved in these systemic child abuse/mass grave stories and it’s mind-boggling to me that we continue to allow an organization with that kind of track record to take responsibility for caring for and placing at-risk children.
Celibacy imho plays a significant role in this. In other churches, you can get normal people to join, because they can still live relatively normal lives, get married, have kids, etc.
With celibacy, you immediatly dismiss all people who wish to live relatively "normal" lives, and get a lot more outcasts into the organization.
Add to this a relatively easy access to children, the higher ups giving protection to criminals, and you get where we are now.
Celibacy might have played a role, though I doubt if the logic is that it "attracts outcasts". If somebody made up their mind to be celibate regardless of whether he is a part of the church or not, I don't think joining the church would predispose them to enacting more abuses on the children.
On the contrary, I would say that the effect could be that it places an unreasonable restriction on "non-outcast" people who otherwise would have wanted to have sex "normally", but were forced to not do so, at least out in the open, when they join the church. Then, their immediate and most obvious choice becomes turning to the children, as you mentioned. This is what I find unreasonable about this blanket celibacy requirement.
I’ve heard that insurance for Catholic Churches aren’t any higher than insurance for a different denomination —- the abuse is at the same level as other churches, it’s just that the Catholic Church is so much larger than any of the others.
I can say that the mandatory training programs and background checks that are required to work with children (now) far exceed anything I’ve seen from other churches.
>It seems like the Catholic Church is often (always?) somehow involved in these systemic child abuse/mass grave stories and it’s mind-boggling to me that we continue to allow an organization with that kind of track record to take responsibility for caring for and placing at-risk children.
While that may be true, it’s only part of the situation here. Residential schools in Canada were part of a system by the gov of Canada to eliminate/assimilate the First Nations people. Many argue this was genocide.
The slash between "eliminate" and "assimilate" is doing a lot of work. It highlights two very different meanings of "genocide". It's the distinction between "killing people" and "killing a people".
You're right regarding the history, of course.
Also sadly, one has a way of turning into the other.
I suspect you'll find relatively few people who will use "genocide" to refer to the eradication of a culture without concurrent mass killing of the members of that culture.
I think the most notable genocides have involved murder, but that doesn't mean they all have. Look at what is happening to the Uyghur people in China; it appears to be more of an operation to destroy their culture and identity than to slaughter the people, at least at the moment.
> I think the most notable genocides have involved murder,
They usually do, but sometimes the overt murder stops while the genocide continues. If, and this is debatable, an endpoint could be drawn for the Native Ameeican Genocide in the US, its definitely long after outright killing based on being a Native not assimilated into the White society stopped being an organized practice.
This is also why the current definition by some western governments/parliaments of what's happening there as "genocide" has credibility issues in some eyes. If everybody suddenly agreed that "genocide" means "systematic attempt at cultural assimilation" then fine (would also mean that such "genocides" have been taking place all the time, since group identities disappear and reappear in an endless ebb and flow, maybe not so much in the modern world with all these nation borders, but much more commonly throughout the history), but just as this chain of comment reveals, 1. a more universally accepted term (also in e.g. the Canadian government's own report) would be "cultural genocide" and seldom would people use "genocide" to mean something without actual mass murdering 2. even the idea of "cultural genocide" is to some extent subject to debate.
If you investigate you will find that the CURRENT Canadian Government released a report saying the CURRENT treatment of indigenous in Canada is an ongoing genocide. Specifically for the eradication of culture you mentioned.
Matters very little what people like yourself who are far away from any impacts want to call it, it's still happening.
I don't think it's irrelevant. If the current population is on board with adopting a more equitable relationship with the other cultures bthat were here first, then that stands a better chance at succeeding.
Well just so you know the past populations were not necessarily more in love with the treatment of indigenous.
Here is an editorial from 1888 about the first Prime Minister of Canada and his starvation of indigenous, doesn't necessarily seem to me that everyone was on board with the treatment back in 1888.[1]
But people do change their identities all the time. And sometimes the destruction of one identity leads to the creation of a new one. This has been a key part of all nation-building exercises. It is a purpose of education and mass-media.
Is the unification of tribes, the destruction of difference, necessarily "genocide"?
Also, if you can speak of the "death of a people", surely you can also speak of a "birth"? What is the source material of the new group?
A grouping is an abstract concept. Individual people have a right to exist, but do abstract groups, just because we anthropomorphize them? Any adjective is an abstract grouping of all nouns to which it'd apply.
> But people do change their identities all the time.
People die all the time, and its not murder. A deliberate campaign to kill a people is genocide. A people dieing by processes that don’t involve a deliberate campaign is not genocide.
The attempted unification of tribes by removing their identity is different than unification. Unification is only so if whatever happens is a joint proposal of some sort
This distinction sounds quite contrived to me. Surely you could see that, in most cases throughout the history, when a united identity emerges out of several different tribes/groups whatsoever, there would be a leading group that exerted greater influence either by force or by (economic etc.) strength. Seldom is the case that all tribes decided that they were absolutely equal and would form a joint entity with the same amount of voluntariness from each side.
I don't think you'd need absolute equality, influence, or perfect agreement, you'd just need it to facilitate somewhat voluntary cultural diffusion to decrease the level of conflict. In the context of the thread, it's historically accurate that this was already present in some ways during the centuries preceding Canada and the US' founding, but fell apart quite dramatically.
So if I take a million people into the gas chambers, and they are diverse in every dimension, then I have merely committed a mass-murder, but not a genocide? But if, in the minds of those people, just before I hit the switch, a collective identity forms -- "The People of the Gas Chamber" -- then my act is instead genocide, due to their internal mental state? (Interestingly, little would be so likely to cause such a shared identity to come into existence, as exactly this kind of shared threat.)
> So if I take a million people into the gas chambers, and they are diverse in every dimension, then I have merely committed a mass-murder, but not a genocide?
Yes.
> But if, in the minds of those people, just before I hit the switch, a collective identity forms -- "The People of the Gas Chamber" -- then my act is instead genocide, due to their internal mental state?
No, acts directed at the extermination of a people, not that incidentally cause it, are genocide. You’d still be committing mass-murder-but-not-genocide, not that the distinction is likely to be more than technically significant, unless you are a acting in a context so as to not render mass murder an international crime but only one subject to local jurisdiction. (Genocide is universally subject to universal jurisdiction, while mass murder requires special additional circumstances to rise to an international crime — either a war crime or crime against humanity.)
And when mass killing does rise to genocide, its not “instead of” being mass murder, but “in addition to”. Same with deportation, imprisonment, torture, rape, enslavement and other “act based” crimes against humanity when done as part of a mechanism aimed at destroying a people. The offenses are cumulative, not alternative.
So then the act rises to this special tier because of the belief, in the mind of the actor, that the victims believe themselves to belong to a common group.
And the goal, to the actor, is not so much killing, as it is the destruction of the belief in each victim's mind, that they belong to the group. The destruction of the body and mind holding the belief is just a means to this end.
You have a very good point. Seems to me happened is that the definition of "genocide" connected to a specific "people" has its roots in the definition of other war crimes. The concept became especially prominent after WWII. Before that I don't think such a distinction was so firmly rooted in people's minds. Sure, it's a way to enshrine the historical importance of the Nazi extermination of the Jews, and it might have served as a way to more easily justify the UN/"peacekeeping" troops inserting themselves in the middle of certain conflicts such as the ones in Yugoslavia or in Rwanda.
It supposedly protects distinct cultural groups from being destroyed which is the right thing to do in today's definition. However, as Sapiens put forward, empires throughout the history have assimilated all sorts of people, and objectively speaking, they didn't necessarily made the lives of those people worse, and in many cases voluntary bi-directional cultural influence took place, until one is barely distinguishable from another. Therefore, I agree to some extent that it seems weird to elevate this definition of "genocide", even sometimes cultural, as something graver than the act of actual mass murder. Sometimes they do happen together, to some extent even in this example, where the children died en masse. But in many occasions throughout the history, the gradual disappearance of a cultural identity is a very distinct thing than people actually dying or having their living conditions worsening. As you said, group identities disappear and reappear in an endless ebb and flow, maybe not so much in the modern world with all these nation borders, but much more commonly throughout the history.
Moreover, a deliberate campaign to eradicate another group's identity, is now something that can be carried out by PR professionals. It puts into perspective that the most powerful companies in the world are in the business of advertising. Or, to use provocative language that is literally true: mind control.
Public schools are statistically more of a danger to children than church institutions. The Catholic church collects flak because A) it’s a politically convenient target B) they’re one of the largest institutions in the world that run children’s programs.
It’s a function of the size of the church. Not only does it mean that there are more Catholic-affiliated institutions (and more opportunities to draw a similarity between troubled institutions), it also means that it is the only organization who can pull off a systematic cover-up. The actual abuse rates are similar whether the institution in question is Catholic, Anglican, or secular.
The “church” in my comment is referring to people. Institutions don’t commit atrocities. People do. I was trying to illustrate (perhaps poorly) that even in our most sincere attempts to be good, we fail at it regularly. But how we love to point out and condemn darkness in others.
When I moved to Thailand, I got into contact with a Dutch national of Jewish decent. We occasionally meet over coffee and have a little chat.
When he was young, after WW2, he lived in several foster homes spread over Europe and managed by nuns. He told me he often had to sexually pleasure the nuns in order to get some extra food. His parents were not able to care for him in this period, but eventually he got back with his parents.
He told me he doesn't look back in anger over that time period though. As far as he knew it was the same in most other foster homes.
Child abuse and neglect by parents is also something that exists. It’s easy to see problems, but context and improvements are much more difficult. The US removed sanitariums due to serious issues, but the situation didn’t improve instead dumping the mentality ill into the prison and homeless populations.
Currently the US use foster homes rather than orphanages, but is it a better system, just different, or worse simply a more efficient way to hide problems? That’s the kind of analysis that’s difficult yet essential for actual improvement.
> Currently the US use foster homes rather than orphanages, but is it a better system, just different, or worse simply a more efficient way to hide problems
I can say anecdotally that being in a foster home was a much better experience than being in group homes. I am sure experiences vary, but I went from feeling like I was a prisioner in group homes to a family in a foster home.
To be clear, I truly believe the median foster homes is better than the median group home. Unfortunately the variance is the problem, with some foster homes and some group homes being truly abusive.
Ultimately, group homes are operating a business. The people running such homes are working there, not necessarily living there. That means the adults don't need to form an emotional bond with the children, while the children do need to form emotional bonds with the adults for their development. That mismatch doesn't exist in foster homes, foster parents are much more likely to invest in foster children (both emotionally and financially) than group home caregivers are.
To take a very blunt IT analogy, it's a cattle vs pets distinction.
> Bluntly put, when an institution is given power over children, more than that of a family, and the auditing is lax, you're gonna get maltreatment, and from there unmarked graves.
Families are not particularly safe. Systems that pulled children from their family for placement in a "correct" family created similar horror stories and the natural families of many are also horror stories.
Air crashes are more notable than auto-crashes despite being less likely per passenger. Similarly, even if institutions fail at 1/10th the rate of placement in families, notable news will still paint us the opposite picture.
I am not disagreeing with you on families. My point is about oversight, and graves.
Here, recently, we had a case of some missing kids where the children were killed and buried in the back yard. The difference is that there was a swiftness in catching them. Or that little girl that was starved to death by her parents near to me -- again, caught.
When it is an institution, there are no external checks on that institution, and so you get these mass graves and by the time people clue in, the perpetrators are dead. My point is that if you're the one auditing your own books, you can get away with a lot, for a long long time, and sometimes that means retiring with having gotten away with it.
Biological family are the only people in the world who manifestly have real “skin in the game” with respect to ensuring the proper treatment of their children. For almost everyone else, especially in institutional settings, there are always other considerations that come before the welfare of individual children.
This said, some children are genuinely better off in the hands of some state-sponsored foster care (especially more modern ones) than in the hands of some neglectful/abusive parents. I have always been of the opinion that being a parent is a job that requires certain skills just like any other, and not everybody is well-qualified to do the job well, while the traditional society puts pressure on everybody to take the job regardless, which could be very dangerous.
The problem with the abuses that we're discussing, as described by somebody down the chain, could be that the church and the foster care institutes are set up in a way so that they are already designated as "special" from the get go. I still don't know if that what's described in Brave New World, i.e. every child in the whole society being raised collectively, is such a bad idea. The author's apparent derision and demonization of such an idea was the most jarring part when I read the book. In fact, many studies have proposed that the whole idea of "marriage" and "nuclear family" is a quite recent invention, or at least is something that was not shared by all hunter-gatherer societies, many of which did raise their children as a group. In fact one could well argue that the strict adherence to monogamy and to one nuclear family is contrary to the human nature, which the incredibly high rate of divorce in the modern society seems to support to a certain degree.
Ironically, the very idea of "marriage" and "nuclear family" seems to be something heavily promoted, even enshrined, by the Christian religions, which themselves committed such atrocious crimes on children.
I guess my main point is, your position seems to be one that emphasizes the importance of "family", while I've always been wary of the idea of elevation of "marriage" and "family" as something of a doctrine, even sacred and not subject to any debate. This idea has always sounded very traditional and potentially irrational to me.
It's similar to the "contract children" or "indentured child laborers" scandal in Switzerland[1], for children born out of wedlock, which continued until 1960. It's amazing how the same story keeps repeating in many countries.
> when an institution is given power over children, more than that of a family, and the auditing is lax, you're gonna get maltreatment
I don't follow your logic leap. You exampled a lot of incidents with institutions but that only, in the best case advocates for institutions being nasty, not family, because it doesn't account for abuse within a family context. Is it quantifiably greater in institutions? We can't answer that by the information provided.
The average family doesn't have a child buried in their yard. So yes I think we can say with confidence these institutions were and are quantifiably worse.
> The average institute also doesnt have children buried in the yard. Your conclusion isnt logical.
I dont think you have any idea what you're talking about. The average residential school does. That's why they're looking. The estimate was 6000 dead children across Canada and they expect that's low.
> As many as 6,000 children died in residential institutions, which ran from 1876 to 1996.
>The accurate figure could be much higher however, since the government stopped recording aboriginal students’ deaths in 1920 in light of the alarming statistics.
Residential schools are a special case compared to other institutions, though. They were deliberately created to destroy indigenous communities. The cruelty was not an aberration, it was part of the system.
It seems like a rewriting of terms, it started out with any time you move the power from the family to an institution, but somewhere about 2 or 3 posts above here it has turned into these particular institutions - in which case there is no argument, these institutions were especially bad but not just because they removed power from the family - probably the more sure cause of their badness was because of the project they were engaged in, the reasons they had for doing what they did, and their viewpoints regarding the children and the family they came from.
If you remove children from under the control of their family and you have a theory that the children are naturally bad and less than human in some ways, yes, that is probably going to lead to exactly this kind of thing.
Actually, the logic is sound. Right now, the calculation is 215 bodies / 1 institute, so an average of 215 bodies per institute. In order to make your statement true, you would already need to find more than 100 institutes without bodies in the yard to bring the average down to 2 bodies per institute, and then find at least another 40 to bring the average below 1.5, in order to make your "the average institute doesn't have children (plural) buried in the yard" true.
It's interesting how language can be used to transform reality so it has appearances other than what is physically real, yet they appear real to our mind. In a sense, language can be thought of as an API into (or maybe even "a generator of") reality itself.
And yet one of the less-emphasized progressive tenets is the destruction of the family, because (e.g. in Marxism) the “family” is part of the bourgeoisie and must be abolished along with them.
The final paragraph is the context I desperately needed for the article to have an impact.
"The Truth and Reconciliation Commission issued its final report on residential schools more than five years ago. The nearly 4,000-page account details the harsh mistreatment inflicted on Indigenous children at the institutions, where at least 3,200 children died amid abuse and neglect."
This is an article from Aboriginal Peoples Television Network, a Canadian channel. While I understand the issue with context, they're writing to their audience of 1) Canadians who probably already know about residential schools as its in the news frequently and taught in schools and 2) aboriginals who most certain know about the horrors inflicted by the government of their people, many of which are still alive today.
> The Kamloops school operated between 1890 and 1969. The federal government took over the operation from the Catholic Church to operate as a day school until it closed in 1978.
How weird that all the most relevant info, was at the bottom.
Yes, this was a Catholic "reeducation" program to forcibly convert indigenous peoples to Catholicism. Apparently the Canadian government turned a blind eye to their crimes for years.
That it apparently continued up through the 70s is terrifying.
The US still has residential schools except they are privately run making the church in charge earn tens of millions of dollars every year as a charity. Though there's less death, they're still removing Native Americans from their home, exposing then to rampant abuse and bigotry, and giving them a standard public school education.
There are a couple run by tribes that serve the purpose of getting children who are in danger at home to a safe place. These are run by enrolled members and have some BIA/BIE or tribal affiliations. Do research who runs the school before donating. The good ones are always short of general operating funds.
The tech for identifying remains must be quite advanced. I don't watch TV shows that might keep me informed on the topic but I imagine it's a well funded area, and like other medical areas the people working there have a strange relationship to their job, given 'job satisfaction' means, successfully identifying cause of death and aiding in criminal investigations as well as relief to families. Not work I could do, bravo to them.
It's unlikely there were enough records to connect the remains with their families. It's also unlikely there will be the big budget required for a TV-style investigation using "zoom! enhance!" technology projected in big screens in glass-walled offices.
The most likely outcome is the remains will be respectfully transferred to local band councils who will perform the appropriate rituals and lay them to their final resting place, and that's it.
It's being reported that they used ground-penetrating radar. I don't believe any sort of exhumation has been performed - or if so, it hasn't been reported. I think it's likely therefore that this is an approximation/estimate from whatever data is coming up in the radar.
Would be interesting to know many more details: was this completely unmarked? What were the conditions of the burials? How old are they (both in terms of age of remains but age at death as well)?
The residential school are a very sad state of affairs with regards to the thinning down of the aboriginal stance and culture in Canada before, during and after the Dominion.
My country has had a very bad holier than thou attitude with regards to history and culture.
In typical aboriginal kickassness, the Ktunaxa took one of those residential schools and turned it into a luxury golfing resort for the rich gentile folks to enjoy, pay for, and be reminded of history.
Fun Canadian conundrum with regards to the aboriginal divide. One of our National heros named Louis Riel was a metis man known as a fighter of aboriginal rights during the dominium of Canada. In all of english Canada, he is presented as a man consumed with mental illness fighting along side the natives, whereas in Quebec, which is francophone and healthily feuding with the anglos on all sides, Mr Riel is presented as a franco hero without any mentions of mr Riel's illness and our country's treatment of the man and his condition. Mr Riel saw himself as the gods next prophet, and went into the british/Canadian courts, after killing a british general, convinced that god would reveil him to the world as the next prophet. That did not work out.
> In all of english Canada, he is presented as a man consumed with mental illness fighting along side the natives, whereas in Quebec, which is francophone and healthily feuding with the anglos on all sides, Mr Riel is presented as a franco hero without any mentions of mr Riel's illness and our country's treatment of the man and his condition.
I don’t get why Quebecers always think they are the only ones who remember Louis Riel. In Manitoba he’s the biggest cultural and historical icon people identify with. He has grandiose stately statues at the legislature, around town and in universities. Schools, school divisions, libraries, streets, bridges, colleges and community centres are named after him. His mother’s house in Winnipeg is a national park preserved and staffed with period role play actors. He is buried in a prominent scenic grounds where people visit all the time. If you go to tourist shops you’ll find t shirts with Louis Riels portrait. There are handsome murals agrandizing him in the trendy parts of town. He is widely accepted to be the founder of Manitoba (having even chosen the name "Manitoba"), and a hero both within and outside the Indigenous 13%, Metis 6% and French ~12% populations here. He has a provincial Stat holiday in February for gods sake! Try not to paint with an overly broad brush.
I was born and raised in Alberta, and this is the first I've heard of mental illness. Louis Riel was described as a hero of the Metis in our Social Studies classes. The course material didn't pick a side for the Red River Rebellion.
I went to grade school in Ontario during the 80's, and I remember the teachings about Riel being quite nuanced. He wasn't demonized nor glorified. If anything, the material was sympathetic to him and the Metis people.
This is unbelievably shocking. Why is this not front page new across the world? Or at least the west? Good god, it’s unbelievable. The doctors should be instantly arrested, why haven’t they been arrested? This isn’t a law suit it’s a criminal investigation. I’ve not heard anything so absolutely disgusting about a first world country in quite some time.
It does appear that the most forced sterilizations, which were part of a eugenics-like program, were stopped in the 1970s based on this article. And there were lawsuits involved by those affected.
Canada likes to whitewash stuff like this because we have a weird superiority complex towards the US. We just treat people better, have less racism and everything is better just by the virtue of being Canadian and not American. It usually goes "Oh first Nations are getting forcefully sterilized? But what about x thing happening in the US?". Remember, Native men were literally kidnapped by the Saskatoon police department and some of them just "disappeared" and it barely made the headlines for a few days. I think that's what people here mean when they boast about living in a "consensus based society", not like those savages south that actually have gasp political opposition & aren't shy of societal debates.
But what else would you expect from a country that is so deep into performative show of virtue that it fully admitted to perpetrating a literal genocide not even 2 years ago just to then proceed to not do anything about it, punish anyone or even really following up on that pretty huge allegation it made against itself? Keep in mind that a lot of the people involved in the disappearence of indigenous women (aka the genocide) are still alive. Tons of those people working for the government who by the government's own logic were directly involved in enabling or ignoring a genocide are still working for the federal gov because firing people, that's a bit too much of to ask for, right? Admitting to genocide is just the path to least conflict, so they did it to avoid a public debate
(And whether you agree with it being a genocide or not, the moment the PM and the government say that it was you should at least expect them to actually do... something about it?)
According to the article the incident in question happened in 1978. It may be still happening, but this article does not make that claim. Rather it says it happened 40 years ago and there should be an investigation to its extent.
EDIT: I was wrong. In addition to the specific incident discussed and the focus on the past, there is this:
"New research shows the forced sterilization of Indigenous women is not just a shameful part of Canadian history. Reports from Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario and the territories suggest it is still happening."
'New research shows the forced sterilization of Indigenous women is not just a shameful part of Canadian history. Reports from Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario and the territories suggest it is still happening.'
But it doesn't provide any evidence or even details related to this beyond the class action lawyers statements like "if we have 60 people in Regina then there are many more out there". I read thje entire article waiting for some form of details about numbers, dates, etc. and nothing. This is typical BS modern "reporting" and it's inexcusable when the subject is so important.
The typical scenario is an indigenous woman going to the hospital to give birth, and the doctor refusing to give her the newborn until she "agrees" to ligation. It's not official government policy, just as killing people for driving while black is not official government policy in the US, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen, nor that it is punished when found out.
I suppose it’s being downvoted because it looks like diversion tactics to draw attention away from what’s actually being discussed, especially considering their other comment making a false assessment of the linked article, as pointed out by throwaway24006.
Disclosure: not related to that other throwaway account in any way. Using a throwaway because I don’t want to drag my main account into ugly topics like this.
It looks like diversion, at least to me, whether pointed out or not.
> I've never seen so many throwaways appear out of nowhere before.
I have seen it many times on radioactive topics. Some people don’t like to discuss under their extremely traceable accounts, especially if they’re close to the subject in question (resides in the country, works at the company, etc.), where it may lead to undesirable consequences.
Anyway, a mod should be able to connect the throwaway to my main identity easily.
Projection by the US, Canada and Australia does not constitute proof.
[edit] Adrian Zenz does not constitute a reliable source. Not only has his work been shoddy, he is a far-right christian sworn to destroy China. He doesn't even speak Mandarin. Of course the US, Britain, Australia, etc. would amplify his work, since it matches their material interests.
This type of suppression of "the other" is incredibly common around the world but it usually, but not always, stops in the current era once it is brought to everyone's attention.
The point isn't to condemn the countries involved (e.g. country A is bad and always will be), but to get the suppression of the minority by the majority to stop by having others around the world speak up for the minority (e.g. country A should stop doing action B because it is wrong.)
This is actually the fundamental principle of human rights groups - speak up for those oppressed when they can not effectively help themselves.
It only appears to be an unchangeable condemnation if there is no chance that the oppression stops. In this case, like in many modern hard cases, there is a lot of denial doing on, both because some want the oppression to continue, and others because they identify with the country involved and believe that all those raising human rights issues are suspect.
But at the same time, false claims of human rights abuses are used all the time to attack official US enemies. Remember the Nayirah testimony? It's merely one of the most visible examples.
The world isn't flat with equal power wielded by all countries. Some are exploited and others are exploiters, at gunpoint. We must be precise about claims made, lest we help the exploiter.
Countries denying their own human rights abuses is par for the course. Blaming anyone who brings up those human rights abuse as being an agent (witting or unwitting) of a geopolitical rival is also par for the course.
The US itself has a lot of its own problems with systematic racism as well.
But if I criticize the US on this front, should I expect a commenter to appear (like yourself) to tell me that this isn't actually an issue -- it is just being pushed by Russia agents who are only doing so because there is a geopolitics rivalry between US and Russia?
> But if I criticize the US on this front, should I expect a commenter to appear (like yourself) to tell me that this isn't actually an issue -- it is just being pushed by Russia agents who are only doing so because there is a geopolitics rivalry between US and Russia?
You seem to be arguing from a position that nothing ever actually ever happens, although everything is happening, and there are no such things as truth or falsehoods, everything is both a position being taken by someone to advance their own interests and an honest and heartfelt concern. I wish you would lower yourself to talk specifically and materially about the claims that you're supporting rather than floating in abstractions.
Russia and China aren't comparable to the US (and allies) in terms of military power, economic coercion or control over propaganda. This false equivalence is manufactured by US and allied media to protect their interests.
It's also worth looking at the actual sources. Try to find something claiming genocide in Xinjiang that doesn't end up using Adrian Zenz or a NED-funded think tank as a source.
On the other hand, for the US's atrocities we have plentiful and varied sources. Some of us have even felt the exploitation and destruction directly or through our families.
China does have a lot of influence as well, it is important not to discount it. It will continue to get stronger as well as it becomes an increasingly important market for goods and services.
For example, this apology by actor John Cena this week because he appeared to contravened the official Chinese line that Taiwan is part of China:
Or maybe John Cena cares about upsetting a large part of his audience, he apologised in decent Mandarin after all. It's unsurprising that imperialist media would twist a perfectly normal apology video into something sinister.
If you talk to people both on the mainland and in Taiwan, you'll find the vast majority consider Taiwan to be a part of China. Many have family on the other side of the Taiwan strait, after all.
Taiwan's local government still officially claims all of China as its territory. This is unsurprising since it's a direct descendant of the KMT, who retreated to Taiwan after losing the civil war to the PRC on the mainland. Only more recently a minority are starting to move towards the idea of Taiwan as an independent country; this minority is overrepresented in Western media.
I agree that John Cena wants to appeal to his fan base in China precisely because China is a growing market for goods and services -- as I said earlier.
I didn't mean to link to that more critical article, I just picked the first one that showed up in Google search for John Cena apology.
The very fact that the first thing you found paints Cena’s action as sinister confirms my point that the mainstream is very eager to spin any challenge to US hegemony as evil. Should that not make one question the narrative being pushed?
At least go read their stated sources, like Zenz’ report. It’s full of unsupported facts and egregious (and convenient) translation mistakes. Then read up on the man himself and his motivations.
I'm not an expert but according to Wikipedia the main culprit was tuberculosis[1], which at the time didn't have an effective cure.
These deaths could have been prevented if all the students were not concentrated into these schools.
Also it appears that the indigenous population was more susceptible to TB.
It appears that TB in the indigenous population is still a problem:
"The TB rate among Aboriginal people was almost six times greater than the overall Canadian rate in 2008 and in Nunavut, it was more than 38 times the national rate (184.4 cases per 100,000 population)." [2]
The Indian Department knew that the schools served as a conduit for the spread of disease from at least 1907 onward. Dr. Bryce was still campaigning to get them to address the issue in the 1920s.
TB is also one of the diseases brought to north america by europeans, so there is less or no natural immunity which comes from thousands of years of exposure, presumably this increased risk from “foreign” diseases still exists to an extent in indigenous populations on top of the other factors which put populations at higher risk.
No, TB was present in pre-Colombian North and South America.
TB is a very ancient disease according to [1,3] and has been present in humans since the dawn of humankind according to [2].
There is evidence of the disease in human remains from the Neolithic era and Egyptian mummies from 3000 BC. Furthermore there are references to the the disease in writing from both ancient India [5] and ancient 2700 BC China, see [4].
According to [6], seals carried TB to the Americas from Africa approximately 6000 years ago; although the Wikipedia entry for TB says that it has been "unambiguously detected" in bison remains in Wyoming dated to around 17,000 years ago. [7]
It's worth pointing out that the abstract of the Nature article appears to suggest that the pre-Columbian evidence is for a different variant of TB: "Here we present three 1,000-year-old mycobacterial genomes from Peruvian human skeletons, revealing that a member of the M. tuberculosis complex caused human disease before contact. The ancient strains are distinct from known human-adapted forms and are most closely related to those adapted to seals and sea lions."
This is completely speculative, but if post-contact TB was a different strain imported from Europe, that may explain why it took such a toll on Indigenous peoples.
I wondered about this myself, but in the second sentence of the Abstract the authors say: "This notion [that TB was introduced post-contact], however, is incompatible with archaeological evidence of pre-contact tuberculosis in the New World." As you speculate, wouldn't the aboriginal inhabitants be more susceptible to TB from Europe even if it was the same disease, but separated by perhaps thousands of years genetically.
PBS claims that by the 1900 one-seventh of every person that had ever lived had died from TB[1], and according to The World Health Organization, "About one-quarter of the world's population has a TB infection, which means people have been infected by TB bacteria but are not (yet) ill ..."[2]
Significantly, The WHO goes on to say that lifetime risk of falling ill with TB if infected is between 5 and 10 percent. The poor treatment of the aboriginal peoples alone could have caused an epidemic of TB illness due to the crowding, malnutrition, and forced displacements.
My own father had TB, I wasn't allowed to visit him in the hospital as a child that year. Fortunately, he was able to obtain the relatively new antibiotic course of therapy in the early 60's that enabled him to be cured over a long period of time.
See also the Canadian Public Health web page on TB and Aboriginal people [3].
There are several different lineages of TB, one of which is global, arrived in populations at the same time as european colonists, and arose at a time long after humans had spread across the globe.
I wasn’t able to quickly find out if there are differences in expected outcomes from different lineages in different human populations.
Pressure is building right now to fund these projects and make a proper accounting of the unmarked and uncounted dead. This is just one of dozens of crime scenes. Consider telling your MP you support this effort.
As a Canadian who was very surprised to find shame underneath all kinds of personal issues after some decades, I want to say I also personally feel and observe shame on all sides of almost anything involving native peoples here.
A comment probably can't begin to convey what any of that means if you haven't experienced it yourself in some way. Practically speaking let me badly paraphrase a 12-step sponsor who said, it might take a year to "work the steps" for an average person, or 5 years if you're saddled with shame issues.
What that means on the scale of a country is pretty much what we observe, decades or centuries of denial, avoidance, actions that make the problems worse.
One of the main characteristics of shame is that shame induces shame, and shame is so unbearable people will do almost anything to not feel shame. I don't know what the answer is or where it even begins but I think any approach that ignores the role of shame will keep awful things happening.
I'd like to see the Church and other Christian institutions who ran these schools held accountable for their crimes in my lifetime. They killed and abused children, that is tautological.
> The Kamloops school operated between 1890 and 1969.
I was going to querry what the estimated amount of dead children there would be as baseline, but the school operated way later then I anticipated and for a shorter time. So 500 pupils and two die every year if uniform, but I guess the deaths were weighted heavely to the beginning. Sounds like a really bad environment for the time, right? The spannish flu surely didn't kill half the school?
It was most definitely a bad environment. Children were essentially kidnapped and forbidden from speaking their language, expressing indigenous identity, and europeanized.
It's interesting to know that the people doing this and supporting it thought that they were doing something good for the kids. Remember that when someone with a good intentioned idea that doesn't respect people's humanity speaks up.
I'd be willing to be that at the time any orphanage or boarding school at the time would have similar problems.
There were so-called British "Home Children" orphans sent over to Canada to work housed at private homes. There are many stories how they suffered the same fate. Even in my province an orphanage of local children one of the typical heritage British/Irish/Scottish/French, they also suffered terrible abuse.
There's no prize for who suffered most. The problem is First Nations children are from a minority with few of their own people remaining the abuse suffered amplifies the tragedy along with losing their culture.
Also to Australia, were they were often physically and sexually abused. Being white does not always protect you from government or private callousness.
This is Canada's great shame, and we've barely scratched the surface.
Arte made a very good documentary about it, but I can't remember the name atm.